


The Mortis Virus

by DeanDaniel



Category: Original Work
Genre: Aliens, Non-serious narrator, One Shot, Original work - Freeform, POV First Person, Pure practice fiction, Slightly unreliable narrator, Writing Prompt, Writing practice, Zombie Apocalypse, Zombies, unnamed narrator, world building
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-05
Updated: 2019-09-05
Packaged: 2020-10-10 13:27:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20528771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeanDaniel/pseuds/DeanDaniel
Summary: Writing prompt: "The zombie apocalypse has come and gone. Humanity has survived and prospered, but with the virus still inside every single human. Centuries in the future, we are at war with an alien race, and they are horrified to learn that we don't stay dead easily"Original prompt by u/Smuzzy_waii (r/WritingPrompts)





	The Mortis Virus

**Author's Note:**

> As you can see, not a fandom related piece of fiction. To be honest, I wrote this to keep myself in form, it's nothing more than a practice piece, something to keep my thought process going. The fandom related fics are still ongoing ofc, I just needed something to push me out of the ditch I fell into. I'm also not following the prompt to the letter, I just built off it.

The zombie apocalypse was…. anticlimactic.

Granted I wasn’t alive to witness any of it happening, but we do have libraries worth of history books that detail the events that took place, nearly five centuries ago, when the Mortis virus first spread. For a short lived supposed apocalypse, there was no shortage of some very enthusiastic records about it.

Disregarding most biased accounts, majority of documents trace patient zero back to a man named Fredrick Sommers. Mr. Sommers was a rickety old man in his late 70s, with poor health and abysmally fragile bones. At the time, he was living with his two grandchildren who were two to three years into college, and he spent most of his time watching cable TV or attending the local bingo hall.

If records were to be believed, the kids took special care of the man and there was nothing amiss. Until the fateful day Mr. Sommers suffered a stroke in the middle of his favourite telenovela, which resulted in him breaking most all of the joints in all his limbs.

Mr. Sommers was immediately taken to a hospital, thanks to a quick call from the local neighborhood snoop who saw the unfortunate accident happen through her window. Despite the EMTs’ efforts to resuscitate Mr. Sommers, the old man was announced dead upon arrival and transported to the morgue while the Sommers kids were contacted.

The night shift workers were the first to encounter the Mortis virus in action. An interview from the staff at the time allegedly reported that Mr. Sommers’ morgue cubicle began shaking. The metal door rattled violently while loud, animalistic, grunts and growls came from within. The attendant on duty quickly stood from his desk, coffee mug in hand, and sprinted to upper ground without looking back. Smart lad.

A group of doctors with their burly team of security guards popped back into the morgue level to deal with whatever was happening. Once the metal door was opened, the vile, toe-curling, stench of decay hit them all like a train. A doctor later commented that it _‘Was an absolute mind-fuck’ _how fast Mr. Sommers decayed, seeing as he’d been dead for only about six minutes or so.

Most would assume that Mr. Sommers had lunged at the team, biting, tearing, and shredding them to pieces, from there the virus would spread through mass chaos at the appearance of zombies. What happened though, was far from that.

If recalled, Mr. Sommers’ stroke caused all joints in his limbs to break. When he came out, zombified and all, it took him three minutes to wiggle out of his hole and splat face first into the cold morgue floor, flailing his useless limbs around like one of those old inflatable silly tubes found near car dealerships.

He couldn’t do much damage to four healthy adult men who pumped iron like a steam train.

After weeks running all their tests, it was concluded that the virus was already airborne the moment Mr. Sommers expired like a day old piece of salami. They took blood samples from everyone who came in contact with Mr. Sommers, including most of the hospital staff and patients. Everyone was positive for the Mortis virus.

Well no shit, the world collectively said as dead people came back all around them.

How it spread was pretty simple, after all, Mr. Sommers attended bingo hall with all the other elderly who had family, the Sommers kids were in college, touching up on other kids in college. There were also the EMTs who came to Mr. Sommers’ aid, who coincidentally came across a lot more accident related injuries after.

Now _how _Mr. Sommers contracted the virus in the first place was a mystery as he was, for the most part, a shut-in since his late teens. Even a few centuries later, none of us knew how a crippled old man managed to pull a fast one on death.

People surprisingly didn’t panic, it was probably the oversaturation of zombie media at the time, so most folks could easily piece together what was happening. Besides, people didn’t like being near dead bodies, and zombies were pretty slow, it wasn’t as hard to avoid as most people think.

Instead, everybody sat at home and waited for the news broadcast about it. Only the zombie-nuts really suffered from the initial outbreak, thinking that their apocalypse gear would help them survive as they ventured out. Unsurprisingly, mail-order and comic con bought nerf rifles didn’t _exactly _save the world.

Soon it was public knowledge that everyone was infected.

Life pretty much adjusted to accommodate the new world and everything the Mortis virus changed. Things were a little tentative for a while, as most didn’t know how to move forward knowing everyone was a ticking time bomb. Humans, however, were pretty adept at ignoring their problems so it didn’t take much long for people to start flooding the- safer – streets again, with more hard pressed _‘Be careful’_s from loved ones of course.

While the police and military were busy punching holes in the ones who were already turned, ordinary folk went around the Mortis virus through the new laws and their own little precautions.

One of my favorite new laws were open-carry funerals, just for the absurdity of it. It was _entirely _legal for everyone to have a firearm on them, only the adults of course, just in case the dearly departed didn’t stay dear or departed.

I think the one account I remember was a widow who, while crying as her husband’s casket was lowered, began to shoot at it when the lid started banging and shaking.

She said it was cathartic, must be nice to move on so quick.

Some people even brought back old traditions, things like cages over graves or putting stones on top of the newly deceased. This time, they weren’t keeping vampires or dearg-dus away, nah, it’s just little Timmy. Photos of parents pushing plates of candies towards their caged zombie children left quite an impact on a lot of people. 

I think the best part of the world turning to shit was when people pushed to give mental health better attention. As bad as it sounded, the Mortis virus actually gave more folks reason to take a second look at the problem of suicide. It wasn’t news, but at the time it was still prevalent, the virus just gave that final push for people to take it seriously, after all, no one wanted the zombie problem to spread even more.

It wasn’t an instant fix by any means, but people took time to ask if someone was okay, they tried harder to not turn a blind eye on local outcasts, families sat down with each other to discuss and listen for once, kinder words traveled across the world during that time, not always, but there was a significant difference from before. Human happiness just became another priority, even more than political power, fame, or money. We had never been as close to a utopia as back then.

It only took a deadly virus for people to care, but it was a blessing even though.

Then, maybe two to three years after the initial outbreak, the world moved on.

Scientists still made an effort to try and combat the virus, but as you can see, people stopped expecting for much after the first century. Eventually, it just became the norm that people came back after they died.

These days it didn’t happen though, once someone died hospitals and hospices usually injected them with a neuron killing chemical, labeled NAn-Mo27, and they pass on like our ancestors used to.

I remember being taught in school, in our history class, how humans used to just bury their dead, without using NAn-Mo27, removing the brain, or using burial cages, and even being so close to the coffin that they could still touch them. It was crazy how unafraid we used to be about saying goodbye.

I buried my own mother a few years ago, she was one of the religious ones and didn’t allow the hospice to use NAn-Mo27 on her. Two minutes after her heart gave out and she flat-lined, the doctors sliced her skull open and cut off her brain. She passed bloody and covered in her own viscera, but she passed quietly. It’s what she would have wanted. 

I don’t believe there’s much to say about our world right now, sure we’ve advanced further as a society and species, and our dead don’t stay dead, but that was normal. 

Still, even with the Mortis virus doing the grotesque adaptation of that Christ guy but with less time, more rotting, and cannibalism, we didn’t _exactly _think what came next was a possibility, crazy right?

At the age of 27, I was drafted into the Space Patrol- which is still a stupid fucking name and I don’t understand how someone can say that with a straight face -because at the time we went to war with an alien race named the Na’arg.

To the surprise of literally no one, the government’s been doing the two step salsa with them for some time now, after their first contact around a decade ago. People laughed at the weird new programs and projects NASA launched, but I guess it was better to laugh back then than now.

If I had a word to describe the Na’arg, I’d say bug. They were just as gross and creepy as all of our local crawlies, and I thank the universe every day that none of the things contracted the Mortis virus like the rest of us.

They had long mandibles, had about eight legs in all, were as fuzzy as car dice, stood at a towering flat 7”, and seemed to resemble the hell-child from a mantis, fly, and roach ménage-a-trois.

They don’t speak English, or any human language duh, but had translators that spoke for them in a monotonous tone. The only thing they really used them for were to shout insults and slurs at us on the battlefield. The insults were pretty funny, _‘Mother cock!’ _was my favourite.

The slurs were…unintelligible, our best guess was that they were trying to insult us with a word from their native language, but the human tongue didn’t have a term for it, so we assumed they were slurs.

Their favorite one, that their translators gave an approximate to, were kazoo sounds. I’ve been kazoo’d maybe ten to sixteen times when I was out fighting, I have a poll with my unit that kept track of the slurs. I’m leading with kazoo, my buddy Ryan led with elevator music. 

As horrible as the whole war was, because face it we were severely unprepared for it, my least favourite thing to do was shoot my fellow men. We had a strict Mortis protocol, if anyone became mortally wounded, who wouldn’t be after getting shot with plasma, we had to destroy the brain. The Na’arg’s guns were clunky, and took a hell of a time to reload, so we had no problems shooting at the newly deceased while we retreated for cover.

We had enough to deal with with these kazoo-ing bug things, dealing with our own dead would be way too much to handle.

The Na’arg were understandably horrified and confused every time we initiated the Mortis protocol, we were called _‘savages’ _and _‘primitive’ _in our waves of double tapping our own.

Eventually we developed a suicide implant, I didn’t miss the irony of it, filled with concentrated NAn-Mo27, it activated when it sensed brain death. Soldiers went down quietly and we didn’t have to waste bullets after that.

Now, laying on the dirt ground with a gaping plasma-shot hole in my neck, I can understand why my mother didn’t allow the hospice to use the chemical on her.

I’m fucking _terrified, _I know I’m dying, but I wasn’t ready. The NAn-Mo27 chemical will start to recognize the early signs of brain death, but I _wasn’t **dead**_**, **even so it’ll try to preemptively kill me off, that was how it worked, as long as you were dying for real there were no second chances with the chemical. I still had a _chance _though didn’t I? Didn’t I _have _a chance to-

_“Dying is within your reach” _I couldn’t move my eyes, but the unmistakable monotonous drone of a Na’arg’s translator drifted from above me. It was funny how the only time they seemed to emote was when they were being rude as fuck. I choked on my words as blood pooled into my mouth, I could taste the stronger coppery flavour of the NAn-Mo27 though, it should be melting by now.

My heart was pounding, the searing burn of the plasma shot ached badly, but I couldn’t even register that I was shot in the neck. I should feel angry, who the fuck were these bugs thinking they could come to our planet, already plagued by a virus that wouldn’t let us give the people we loved a proper _goodbye_, and start a war just so they can occupy it themselves.

Instead, I don’t feel much of anything, I’m probably desensitized to human demise, even my own, as most people were these days. I don’t know if we even _count _as human anymore, not like our ancestors. Humans don’t come back from the dead. In some weird way, maybe it _was _for the best that we were wiped out, for good this time.

The Na’arg above me made a soft clicking sound from the back of its throat- laughter, I think, I don’t know I’m _dying_-as it stepped over me and took aim at my retreating unit. It was nice while it lasted, I guess, I’m just a _bit _disappointed I wasn’t kazoo’d one last time.

_“PIIIIUUUUIII!!!”_

Huh?

I really shouldn’t be giddy about hearing that familiar kazoo, but I’d absolutely rather die laughing than existentially miserable. With what little strength I could muster, I turned my head just slightly to my left, just in time to see a Na’arg fall to the ground with what looked like…Dave? On top of it.

That….that _was _Dave wasn’t it? No it can’t be Dave, I remember _vividly _how large the hole in his chest was, he should be dead, the NAn-Mo27 chemical should already be in his system, flooding towards his brain, to make sure he….doesn’t..come back…

_Shit._

My last thought, I can still recount it in the small space where I’m still lucid, was thinking how _stupid _we were, how blind. Humans really don’t utilize everything we have, we think we do, running gung-ho into this space war like dying actually meant something, like dying meant we gave _everything _to protect the earth.

Dying wasn’t supposed to be what stopped us, we had so much more to give.

As my vision began to blur from excessive blood loss, I vaguely saw Dave begin to tear into the downed Na’arg with nothing but his bare hands, like he was pulling apart an insanely gross s’more. A plasma shot got him in the shoulder, but he kept going like it never even happened, all until he bit into the Na’arg’s head, ending its useless flailing for good.

I think I saw my supposedly dead comrades start coming back, maybe they saw what happened to Dave and got the same idea, the Na’arg’s panicked clicks and screeches followed after.

I spit out the implant before I died. The Mortis virus wasn’t meant to kill humanity anyway; we’ve known that for a long time now.

I’m glad that we didn’t save the first apocalypse for nothing at least.


End file.
